I have
noisy neighbors, but they're not of the
ghettoblaster kind
nor are they
drunk or always
screwing. No, they're just a
family of four
upstairs in a 2-bedroom
apartment with
wooden floors. The
noise they generate
emanates mainly from my
bedroom's
ceiling since its the kid's room up there. It is not surprising to hear 3 or 4 kids
running around,
jumping,
throwing heavy things on the ground in this room, probably being watched by one of the parents, who both wear heavy shoes. There is always someone making a continuous
rattle in this room, unless it is between 9 PM and 7 AM. So, forget about any sunday afternoon
nap and just bite into your
pillow when you have a
headache. I've talked to them, but they don't seem to give a shit, and here where I live, I do not have any
recourse (the best I could hope would be to get my
lease terminated). Recently one of the pictures on my wall fell off.
It's that bad.
So, I'm thinking about building my own Audio Retaliation System. Since any noise I make generally pisses off the guys downstairs, the design of the ARS should include ceiling-mounted brackets to hold at least one loudspeaker, upturned of course. It would be plugged into a second-hand amplifier; I think I could get both of these for under 50$. I would then connect the output of my computer's soundcard on this amplifier so that I'm not limited to music as for retaliation. I'm thinking of building a user interface that could let me choose between audio files or that could generate specific audio attacks such as white noise, rapid pulses, booms, modulated carriers, etc. This would be far more efficient than me hitting the ceiling with my bare hands, since this is much less noisier than what they habitually do themselves.
Hopefully if they hear these disturbing noises each time I'm fed up with them, they will learn something; yes, I really hope to train them back to civility. I'm not sure about it yet, but training could be far more efficient if the ARS would be active even without me being present. So a microphone could be hooked up to the soundcard and the ARS activated whenever the ambient noise is above an adjustable threshold. Of course, it is essential that the ARS be switched between a "listen" and a "retaliate" mode as to prevent positive feedback. Hey, and why not using the microphone to automatically repeat the noises they make!
I'm thinking about Matlab to build the software since working with audio is really easy and building a GUI is not a problem anymore.
You know this is really only a fantasy. I'm moving out in a few months. Sigh.